Abstract

Friday, January 1, 2016

A resolution

Stay in
the moment. Don’t pity yourself. Don’t dwell on the likelihood that otherwise you
would be a good bet to live into your eighties. Keep in mind you came reasonably
close to dying at thirteen, in a tiny solo sailboat in Bellingham Bay, with
scarcely a clue of how to sail. And that six years later, on a December road trip
to Bozeman, Montana, you made the mistake of departing on the second morning before
dawn, in order to reach Bozeman before nightfall. It was still dark when you
hit the patch of black ice, at Fourth of July Pass, high in the Idaho Panhandle.
Your friend braced his arms against the dashboard as you tried, and failed, to
steer against the skid, before slamming into a snowbank, at the lip of a ravine.
Keep in mind how the highway maintenance guy who dragged your Mustang away from
the abyss remarked, matter-of-factly, “Last week some guy got his neck broke.”

Take the long view of things. William Shakespeare died at
age fifty-two, after compiling a stupendous body of great writing. Did his friends
lament a life cut short? In Shakespeare’s time, the average lifespan was
forty-two years. Shakespeare died an old man.

Exercise daily. Drive the blood to the brain. Swim at
least twice a week. Bicycle regularly (but not when streets are sheathed with
ice). Walk vigorously. Jaywalk only when you are confident you will not be cut
down. Avoid swiveling around cars like a running back bursting into the
secondary.

Write down your thoughts before they evaporate. Keep a notepad
and pen nearby at all times.

Maintain a lid on your temper. It’s nice that you no
longer need to spend ten hours away from home each weekday, but perhaps spouses
were not designed to be around each other constantly? Do not overreact to
irritating tendencies—yours and those of loved ones. Above all, practice
self-honesty. Meditate regularly. Don’t delude yourself about your decline. Give
thanks for experiencing little or no decline in your writing abilities.
Maintain the hope that this will remain the case for many years to come.

Read aggressively. Keep in mind this curious passage from Dostoevsky’s
The Idiot: “This man had once been
led to a scaffold, along with others, and a sentence of death by firing squad
had been read out to him, for a political crime. After about twenty minutes a
pardon was read out to him, and he was given a lesser degree of punishment;
nevertheless, in the space between those two sentences, or a quarter of an hour
at the least, he lived under the certain conviction that in a few minutes he
would certainly die.” When the convicted man believed he had only five minutes
left, time seemed to slow down in a big way. “He said those five minutes seemed
like an endless time to him, an enormous wealth. It seemed to him in those five
minutes he would live so many lives that there was no point yet in making arrangements….
He was dying at the age of twenty-seven, healthy and strong; bidding farewell
to his comrades, he remembered asking one of them a rather irrelevant question
and even being very interested in the answer.”

Attend church regularly, and listen attentively. Value pew
time as a refuge from consumer culture. Don’t get hung up on ossified doctrine.
Read up on Emerson and the other Transcendentalists. Appreciate the simplicity
of Pascal’s wager, the gist of which is that living a moral life can serve as a
celestial insurance policy – should God, to my surprise, reveal himself.